CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++visual-studio-2013trace
Mordachai
Mordachai

Reputation: 9662

Why would TRACE stop functioning?

Unfortunately, it's hard to pin-point when exactly this stopped working... a few days or a week ago perhaps...

But our software's many TRACE statements - which boil down to ATL::CTraceFileAndLineInfo(__FILE__, __LINE__) - no longer produce output to the VS 2013 Update 4 debugger output window.

I get some output there - firstchance exceptions, thread exist, DLL loads & unloads, etc., ... just nothing from our traces.

I recently updated the projects to revert to using v120_xp toolset - but when I double checked against our previous version of software - I can see that our projects are exactly the same (and I had no such issue with the former projects).

Of course I did a clean (I have a batch script that is even more thorough than the clean build target in VS2013).

Tracing through the call into operator()... goes about a dozen levels deep to:

_CRTIMP int __cdecl _VCrtDbgReportW
(
    int nRptType,
    void * returnAddress,
    const wchar_t * szFile,
    int nLine,
    const wchar_t * szModule,
    const wchar_t * szFormat,
    va_list arglist
);

Which finally terminates at

OutputDebugStringW()

beyond that I get into disassembly and I lose interest in following the logic. But by the time we get to OutputDebugString() we've gone through all of the intervening levels and we really are asking Windows to output the message... which it just doesn't do.

It also begs the question: what changed?

I've gone through source control several versions back, and through comparison to last year's code base, and I see nothing new / relevant.

There was a Windows update last Thursday....

...has anyone else suddenly lost the ability to see their TRACE output to the VS2013 debug window? Has this happened to anyone before (who knows how to solve it)?

Update: 5/18 5:07PM EST "Repaired" option - didn't help Clean - didn't help Reboot - didn't help walked through all of the debugging options (were already correct - and toggling them / moving the output to the immediate window) - didn't help Running other projects - no output also

... uninstall VS2013 is next...

10/12/2015 Update: Nothing worked. Trace for that project continued to work on other machines. I had to reinstall Windows from scratch, and then it resumed working.

The projects never changed. But something on that PC stopped working. Who knows?!

Upvotes: 3

Views: 656

Answers (2)

Mordachai
Mordachai

Reputation: 9662

10/12/2015 Update: Nothing worked. Trace for that project continued to work on other machines. I had to reinstall Windows from scratch, and then it resumed working.

The projects never changed. But something on that PC stopped working. Who knows?!

Upvotes: 0

ivan_pozdeev
ivan_pozdeev

Reputation: 36046

The first guess: you stopped linking against a debug version of MFC. (but if OutputDebugStringW is called, that's not likely)

You may check if the API itself works with DbgView to see if the problem is in the system API or in VS.

Visual Studio output window is not displaying messages sent by Debug.Write() mentions a few relevant options in VS. I can't yet find any M$ bug reports.

Listing the updates you got may provides some ideas of what has changed.

Resettings VS settings then restarting VS (plus deleting any .user and .suo files from the source tree after closing VS if the reset didn't do that) can help if this is a new-code-old-config-type screw-up.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions